Dr. Dan Siegel is a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine, the founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, and the Executive Director of the Mindsight Institute. He has a unique ability to make complicated scientific concepts easily understood and impelling through his many books, such as Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain, Aware: The Science and Practice of Presence and his most recent book, IntraConnected: MWe (Me + We) @drdansiegel
Natalie: So, Dr. Dan, you are the perfect person to welcome into this issue of Human Shift magazine because the conversation is all about the sixth chakra, which at its widest focus, you could say is clear perception. What does this notion of clear perception or clear seeing mean to you now?
Dan: What a beautiful question. I think clear seeing is arriving at the place where you access a kind of sea of potential. To get there, we need to first drop beneath the constructed filters the mind inevitably makes to try to sort through the huge amount of energy flow passing through these bodies we’re born into. In order to make sense of the sensory experience, we filter, dividing things up into categories and concepts, and symbols, which are all filtered outcomes of this effort to select certain aspects of experience. However, if you see experience as energy flow, using the notion from physics that energy is the movement from possibility to actuality, then in terms of the six chakra and clear seeing, it is that sea of potential or, as we also call it, a plane of possibility. It’s this generator of diversity from which experience arises from potential into actuality.
Clear seeing allows you to drop into the source of awareness, which is when the energy is in that plane of possibility. You know it because it has a feeling of incredible spaciousness and timelessness. Specifically, it has a feeling of intraconnectedness, a wholeness within the connectivity. It’s not just interconnected, which implies there’s an entity here called Dan and an entity there called Natalie.
Intraconnectedness says there’s a wholeness, a woven fabric of not only what’s between you and me, but also what exists between everyone reading these words. In essence, clear seeing gives you the feeling of that intraconnected wholeness.
